Chicken with Roasted Lemon and Rosemary Sauce Reviews

In 1997, my Tra Vigne crew and I cooked for a week at the Mandarin-Oriental in Bangkok, Thailand. The hotel's chef wouldn't let me leave without giving him this recipe. It will look familiar to everyone, but wait until you taste it.

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Reviews

users rating3/4

My husband and I enjoyed this recipe very much. I made a couple of changes to the recipe. Instead of lemon I used lime and prepared the sauce in one pan. I condensed the sauce and poured it over the chicken and potatoes, then cooked in on 400 for an hour and fifteen minutes. The chicken came out tender and juicy, with the meat falling off of the bones.
I used a whole chicken instead.
This is a quick and easy recipe to prepare. I would make it again. It is light and healthy.

From start to finish this dish took less than an hour to prepare, and was fairly straight forward and easy to follow. The chicken was tasty, and the baby potatoes were soft and delicious. I would definetely make this again.

I'm teaching a small cooking class for local foodies, and we made this dish for our main course. First off, it is a lot of work, sauteeing the chicken, removing it from the pan, frying the potatoes, removing them from the pan, etc., so I think if I make it again I'll simplify the recipe. Also, the sauce was inexplicably bitter -- we could only guess that this was from the pith/skin of the roasted lemons, which extracted some bitterness when we juiced them. It was pretty unpleasant. Also, the sauce needed to be reduced considerably. I used a double-rich stock for the sauce, but it yielded a sacue with no body. I think that the recipe would be better with a true stock reduction or near demi-glace. I'm not going to give up on this recipe, but I am going to redo it for a home kitchen.

I agree this was rather a lot of work for a weekday dinner. While my guests enjoyed it, I have to say the sauce with the roasted lemons is entirely too strong/lemony. I tried to tone it down by adding in some margarine as was suggested (I didn't have butter). I can't say it helped.

While I was making this, it seemed like a pain. . .a lot of steps for not many ingredients. The end result was worth it though. DELICIOUS! The chicken was very moist (I used skinless breasts because that's what I had on hand) and the sauce was very tasty. I will make this again, though I would be more likely to make it on the weekend, not after a day at work. I suppose some of the steps (roasting the lemons, concentrating the broth) could be done ahead of time.